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Counting Guns In Early America, James T. Lindgren, Justin Lee Heather
Counting Guns In Early America, James T. Lindgren, Justin Lee Heather
Law and Economics Papers
Probate inventories, though perhaps the best prevailing source for determining ownership patterns in early America, are incomplete and fallible. In this Article, the authors suggest that inferences about who owned guns can be improved by using multivariate techniques and control variables of other common objects. To determine gun ownership from probate inventories, the authors examine three databases in detail-Alice Hanson Jones's national sample of 919 inventories (1774), 149 inventories from Providence, Rhode Island (1679-1726), and Gunston Hall Plantation's sample of 325 inventories from Maryland and Virginia (1740-1810). Also discussed are a sample of 59 probate inventories from Essex County, Massachusetts …
Fall From Grace: Arming America And The Bellesiles Scandal, James T. Lindgren
Fall From Grace: Arming America And The Bellesiles Scandal, James T. Lindgren
Law and Economics Papers
Before there was a scandal, there was a book - Michael A. Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Arming America is a well-written and compelling story of how early Americans were largely unfamiliar with guns until the approach of the Civil War. It tells a wide-ranging, detailed, but relatively unnuanced story of gunlessness in early America. Bellesiles writes: "The vast majority of those living in British North American colonies had no use for firearms, which were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use." His primary evidence was low counts of guns in probate …
Counting Guns In Early America, James T. Lindgren, Justin Lee Heather
Counting Guns In Early America, James T. Lindgren, Justin Lee Heather
Law and Economics Papers
The picture of gun ownership that emerges from these analyses directly contradicts the assertions of Michael Bellesiles in Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000). Contrary to Arming America's claims about probate inventories in 17th and 18th century America, there were high numbers of guns, guns were much more common than swords or other edge weapons, women in 1774 owned guns at rates (18%) higher than Bellesiles claimed men did in 1765-90 (14.7%), and 83-91% of gun-owning estates listed at least one gun that was not old or broken. The authors replicated all the portions of Bellesiles' …